Editor's note: At the 2014 Tokyo Video Game Show, there was a brief appearance of an independent work called "Vane", and attracted a lot of attention with its peculiar artistic style, transformed into a bird teenager, the desert-like world, it seems to have the shadow of "Wind Traveler" and Ueda's works, but this work did not follow the trend, but it was announced after nearly 5 years to be released, can it regain that brilliance now?
The Weathervane will be released on January 15, 2019 and is exclusive to the PS4 platform.
When game developers sit down at their tables, intending to bring their dream-inducing ideas to life, they usually start with a genre, a set of gameplay, a character, or an opening that leads to an ambitious script. However, the upcoming adventure game Weathervane begins with a feeling.
"Games don't generally do that," says Matt Smith, one of only five members of Friend & Foe, the team behind Weathervane, "and it turns out that it makes sense." It's really, really hard to do games our way."
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According to Smith, thanks to the team's strong art background, they easily laid the cold beauty of "Weathervane". If you prefer mysterious indie games, the setting of Weathervane will not be unfamiliar to you: the player plays as a child with strange abilities, exploring alone in a sinister environment, trying to unravel the mysteries hidden in this lonely world. However, after establishing a general tone, the construction of almost every aspect of the game has caused several creatives who strive for the best to fall into a long-term tug-of-war for four years.
Like many adventure games that focus on emotional rendering, Weathervane also carries a lot of Ueda's works, especially the groundbreaking Castle Trail (Ico). Smith acknowledges that the similarity is not a coincidence. In fact, "Weathervane" was notable as soon as it was announced in 2014, and was regarded as a shocking stand-alone work, and it was rumored that several of the developers were former employees of Ueda Fumito, who had been involved in the long-delayed "The Last Guardian" project.
But that's not exact — only two members of the founding team have contributed to The Last Guardian, and one of them quit early. However, players who have been admiring Ueda's new work for a long time have taken a keen interest in this suspected "official match" project when "The Last Guardian" seems to be far away. While Smith and the other members were grateful for these positive reports at the time, they were relieved to finally be able to escape the huge shadow cast by Ueda Fumito.
"Yes, the release of The Last Guardian saved our game from being a frame of reference, after all, many people thought that The Weathervane would be launched first, but we found that it was just the beginning," Smith said. But at the same time, as artists, we want our work to be unique."
"We never intended to replace The Last Guardian, nor did we think about launching it before it," says Ivar Dahlberg, a senior member of the team.
Smith compares the stunning brilliance of Friend & Foe's work to Below, a darkly screened, hardcore roguelike game from Capybara Games. While the game impressed players at E3 2013 with its hazy beauty and Zelda-esque glamour, the development team remained silent for five years since, until the game was unexpectedly released in December 2018. Smith believes that this is also the current situation that producers must face in the overcrowded era of independent development. Regardless of the outcome, your game only has one or two chances to take the stage, and you have to be vocal.
"I'm not judging whether what we did was right or wrong," he says, "but I'm glad to see Weathervane stand out for its art style, which is also the benefit of the team members as artists." Although the game was still in its early stages when it was first announced, it already looks quite refined."
"But it also makes things a little bit more difficult because people think it's more done than it really is," Dahlberg adds, "so in the end everybody was surprised that it took us so long to get it done." But, frankly, sometimes game development takes so long."
During the exchange, Dahlberg and Smith repeatedly mentioned the collective artistic work behind The Weathervane, and sometimes how this work slowed down the progress of the project, in exchange for a more nuanced consensus. Smith jokes that because several members are from Northern Europe, they have a very "Nordic" approach to conflict resolution. Although it is not uncommon for each person to work together in the indie game world, you can also say that the team is forced to be helpless.
Six months after the development of Weathervane began, Friend & Foe lost one member and what they saw as a "source of creativity," Rui Guerreiro. While Dahlberg claims that Guerreiro's departure was a major blow to the team, he ultimately decided that the finished product they had created was so far removed from Guerreiro's original vision that it was hard to imagine how the two would be different (if you want to experience Guerreiro's version, check out his upcoming VR game Mare).
"Initially, we envisioned the project very differently than it is now, because it was more like we were working with someone who knew all the answers, so we didn't need much brainstorming," Dahlberg says, "Right now, I can't say if those answers still have an impact, but Guerreiro's departure gave us the opportunity to make our own version of the game and explore further after that." The process of groping may have been delayed for some time, but it is inevitable because we do not know, nor can we know, what the original version should have looked like. It's not so much that we're pushing the game forward, it's that it's going in its own direction, and I think it's a very different way of making it."
"My time on the team basically coincided with the time when Guerreiro left," Smith says, "so, for me, The Weathervane is a development route that follows the direction Guerreiro originally set, and the second half of the journey is explored by ourselves, and it takes us four years to get out of our own understanding." If he hadn't been part of the team, our design direction might have been very different, but this actually applies to every member. In such a small studio, everyone has a pivotal role to play, not just the creator. All collaborators leave their mark on the soup base, the seasoning, or the ingredients, and our game is the stew itself."
The indie gaming world values ingenuity more than anything else. In such an area, a team that shares design tasks with each other is less attractive to the outside world than a single developer, and people see it as a painstaking creator, alone to make their ideas into a flawless whole. In Smith's view, the worship of a bloody, independent genius is a good story to tell to consumers, but it does not reflect the true state of most game development.
"The concept of 'individual author' is an inappropriate term in every field," Smith says, "and film directors delegate power to many people they trust, and even writers need the help of editors." Games are more collaborative than most art forms because they cover so many very different fields. Our team is not like a drifting waterfall that goes down the way, but a wave-making pool that surrounds it, each doing its job and functioning."
"One thing that has always bothered me is how to make the game easy to experience while taking into account the complexity and depth of the game, which is extremely difficult to do. People expect the creator's philosophy to be embodied in the game, so as to understand it and find resonance."
While the January 15 release date is just around the corner, Friend & Foe is tight-lipped about the detailed gameplay of Weathervane. There's no doubt that Weathervane has a creative dna similar to the meditative atmosphere of Wind Traveler, but Smith and Dahlberg say that Compared to today's games, Weathervane's ending is more open and the process of arrival is more bizarre.
In particular, the studio has repeatedly tugged at the question of which is more important, the difficulty and immersion of the game, and has argued over whether to keep the basic tutorial. The details don't seem to be worth arguing about, but Dahlberg argues that the game's center of gravity is still the unique feel that should be evoked in the Guerreiro prototype, so any design that might interfere with this will be a major obstacle to the power of the game's art.
Even though it's been four years in the making, it's hard for Smith and Dahlberg to explain the core gameplay without getting it through, resulting in a disruption to potential players' experience. After a period of organizational language, Dahlberg explains that the basic tension of The Weathervane comes from the confrontation between the earth and the sky. In the vast expanse, desolate and empty scene, the player soars between heaven and earth in the form of a bird, searching for puzzles that can be solved and objects that can be interacted with. While not acknowledging that The Weathervane's gameplay experience is non-linear, they do mention that players have a certain degree of freedom and choice in the flow of the game.
"I think you can define the game by your own actions," Smith says, "and most fundamentally, it's an adventure game where you explore the environment, interact with your surroundings, and solve some light puzzles." We don't explain too much to the players, and it's up to you to interpret the game."
"The theme of the game is to change form," Dahlberg says, "and it's not hard to see in the shots of children turning into birds." As the game progresses, several other transformations will appear. However, the content of the game is not only about changing yourself, but also about trying to change the environment, change the world, and understand the limitations of this change or the possible outcomes. It's a very different world from reality, and we've left a lot of rich content for you to read, but we're sure many people will read some meaning out of it."
While Smith says he can understand comparing Weathervane to Wind traveler, he mentions that Weathervane is minimally restrictive to players, unlike the popular indie games of recent years, which are mostly indifferent.
When in bird form, players can find dozens of interactive objects, which do not have much impact on the game, but more to give the player a deeper understanding of the world and their position. According to Smith, the team's goal is to give players the freedom to explore the vast map, discover and own some strange objects, rather than shackle the player to a linear narrative.
"We wanted to design a puzzle game where it was up to the players to explore and make decisions," Says Dahlberg. Heaven and earth are so vast, where do you go? Eventually, the degree of freedom narrows as it progresses, but the game is very open at the beginning and it's up to the player to figure it out for themselves. Most games will push you in a predetermined direction very early on, such as "The princess is trapped in the castle and goes to rescue her". Our games don't give you that goal, and as a developer, achieving that sometimes fadantly fadinates me."
For Dahlberg, the conflict between designing player guidance and letting the player decide is the most difficult part of the development of Weathervane. As a studio, Friend & Foe initially made the openness of the gaming experience a top priority. However, as the project progressed, the team began to realize that this great sense of freedom came at a cost and was not acceptable to all players. As a result, the team had to learn to guide players in what Dahlberg called "non-intrusive" elements, such as sound cues, which he described as "speaking to the player without making them aware of it."
Although the details of the game are still hidden in the shadows, it is clear that the studio also wants to work together on more projects and wants to make the game reach more players. For Smith, however, the Weathervane made by Friend & Foe is something they're happy with, far more important than the level of sales, even if they don't know if the openness of the game will keep some players away.
"We don't like to talk about this, but, apart from the fantasy vibe, it's actually a sci-fi game, for better or worse," he said, "I remember one day when we sat down and discussed some of our plans for Weathervane, I said, 'What we're really going to do is a walking simulator of Dark Souls, right?'" Ultimately, that's all I think of Weathervane. Maybe it won't appeal to all players, but I'm still very happy with our work."